Archive for April, 2009

We have a couple non-standard fonts that we use for some of our our FPU class materials. For our new Coordinator Resource Center we wanted to use these same fonts in a server generated PDF file. However, this was the first time we’ve actually used a non-standard font with ColdFusion. This turned out to be a much more difficult task than it would seem. During this process I ran into a few issues. (These apply to ColdFusion MX 7.02)

Font Family vs Font Face
Within the True Type Font file, there are definitions for the “Font Family” and the “Font Face.” For some reason, ColdFusion would not read the file unless these were set to the exact same string. I used a font editor to modify these. In addition, if the font file contains different a “Windows Name” and “Mac Name” you might want to make those the same as well.

System vs. User Defined File Location
There is a difference in where you place the files. If you happen to be running ColdFusion on a Windows box, you’re better off just installing the fonts as you normally would through the control panel. Developing locally, I didn’t have any problems with that. However, our server runs Linux and I needed to set a custom path to tell ColdFusion where to look for the fonts. This is easily done through the Administrator control panel.

However, unless you have this hot fix installed, it will never read the fonts and never give you an error. The admin tool will show you they are installed, but when you try to generate a PDF using them, it will always fall back to a system font. The documentation on this hot fix gives you no indication that it will fix this problem, and it is not included in any other service pack. However, this solved the problem for us.

Font Types
Supposedly, ColdFusion will support the following font types:TTF (True Type Font)
TTC (True Type Collection)
OTF (Open Type Font)
AFM (Adobe Font Metrics)
However, I ran into an OTF font where (no matter what I did) I could not get the PDF to output that font. It would keep falling back to the system font. I ended up using [FontForge] to convert it from OTF to TTF.